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Earth Is Dying!

The Earth is not big enough for everyone. Population growth combined with resource decline will drain what we have very shortly, we must expand! You must send as many refuges away from Earth as you can, before the planet is dead and humankind with it. Oh, and you have, like, 3 minutes.

How to play:
As soon as you pop into the game, Earth is quickly becoming a wasteland.

A/D/Left/Right: Move left/right along the solar system.
Space: Launch a rocketship with colonists from Earth
S: Launch a seed ship with resources from Earth
(debug) P: Restart game, so you don't have to close/reopen

The Point:
Save as many people from Earth as possible, the game ends when Earth dies. Your score is the number (in Millions) of people who are not on Earth at that time. People in ships don't count (to prevent cheating by launching to nowhere at the last moment). Have it planned. The game is meant to be played in about 2-3 minute attempts.

Sadly, I did not finish what I set out to do. I did not have the time on Sunday I had planned, so now I am releasing what I have. It is "gameplay complete", it plays, and there is a start and finish.

I (luckily) had prototyped out my game on Saturday, so the gameplay is actually there.

What is included:
Windows executable and source code, of course. The source is a Unity project, it will generate an OSX app without issue, though I haven't included one here.

Tips:
Ships take time to reach their destinations, and also cost resources. With Earths resources already dwindling, you must balance out population growth on multiple planets to save as many people as possible.

Ratings

Comments

I like the idea of choosing which planet to migrate to but far too underdeveloped. The graphics were great - super good job on using correct scales of the planet sizes. I kind of wanted to develop on the Sun but unfortunately that option was not available.

Yes this is really a bare bones prototype. I could have added sound and polished graphics but really what it needed was more mechanics. I didn't figure I'd pull that off without having sunday available. Thanks for commenting, perhaps in the future I'll add a send-to-sun option, for those citizens looking for a more dignified exit!

Thanks for the comments so far guys! I will probably do some work on it post competition. Balance, graphics, audio and UI mostly. Less work than it sounds like, I could have had this done on sunday I think :) Next time!

Not going to lie; I sent a lot of bastards to Mercury just because I felt like it. It was there fault I wasn't voted Mayor of Earth, after all!

Anyway, I like the concept and really wish to see it developed further. It'd be interesting to have to deal with not only Earth Politics, but Venus/Mars/etc Politics at the same time and prevent complete and total anarchy from occurring as a result. Good luck!

This is a good idea, but could do with a few tweaks. I'd like to see all the planets in one view - it would make managing stuff easier. I'd also like some sort of global indication of how much time I have left before the end of the world - maybe a huge bar that stays glued to the bottom of the screen, to incite panic. :-)

I played about five times. Even in the end it feels really quite difficult. I did find it kind of intriguing trying to figure out a good balance of things. I kept improving for sure but felt frustrated by how fast the game would end just when I wanted to see how I was doing.

Very creative game. I like the premise a lot. As you said in your post-mortem, there is a lot of balancing to be done, but I think the game is already somewhat fun.

Here are a few suggestions to make your game more awesome
1- Show some sort of preset high score, so we can have some idea of how well we did

2- Decouple the death of the earth from the number of resources -- have the earth obey similar resource growth/reduction rules as the other planets, but also add a fixed timer for earth death

3- make the game a little slower paced (also reducing the rate of growth of other planets) - I think if the game lasted about 5-6 minutes instead of the current 2/3, it would allow us to try different tactics.

Cheers, and thanks for the unique game!

(PS: my highest score was around 24.000 btw)
(PPS: Also what jjwolf said!)

I'm really glad to see so many positive comments, considering I didn't get to finish. Thanks everyone!

To address some common criticisms, I did want the game to last about 5 minutes, but tweaking my formulas for growth/reduction was time consuming, I never got it where I wanted it, thus the game ends very quickly. If I do a post-compo version (pretty likely), I'll have much more time to tweak these numbers.

A (local) highscore was planned but never implemented, which is too bad as it was likely just a 5 minute addition. I should have forced that time.

Originally I thought colonies would never be able to send back resources, but now I think the game could be extended simply by throwing resources (but not people) back at Earth. It may give you a couple minutes extra even if I don't tweak the rates. I'll have to play around.

I'm not in favour of Earth gaining resources -- in testing it proved that if you sent enough people away, the Earth would never die. But a fixed timer on Earth-death doesn't seem as interesting. I suppose you could have an asteroid hit at the 5 minute mark, but it feels a bit cheap.